MM Yu
Either/Or
MO_Space, Manila

None of the roughly 500 photographs comprising “Either/Or”—Filipino photographer and painter MM Yu’s latest solo exhibition—stands alone in meaning. While it is tempting to exhume meanings out of the images’ content, the artist’s strength lies in her deftness with process and material. Spanning more than two decades of works, the exhibition at MO_Space in Taguig City presented recontextualization as Yu’s primary approach to image-archiving. Here, time was her collaborator, and subject matter the material.

Consider the assemblage of photographs entitled no end (2001–25). Shot over the span of 24 years, the images are clustered above and below a bookshelf occupying the longest wall of the gallery. They show minute details of urban life in Manila, from nondescript closed storefronts to sidewalk garbage. An apparent preoccupation of Yu’s is signage; many are laced with the artist’s sardonic wit and irony (e.g., a residential gate warns public urinators of a surveillance camera), while some are like a heartbreaking cry for food written on the reverse of a Jollibee advertisement. Notably, there is no indicator of time within the images except for contextual clues. For instance, a photograph of the EDSA highway before the implementation of the busway scheme implies a pre-2020 provenance. But in general, one can hardly discern which photograph was taken 24 years ago or which one is barely a month old, because all ring true until today: poverty, waste, and traffic congestion still constitute daily life in Manila. Their significance thus lies not so much in the image they paint of the city, but in the way they portray temporal suspension.